Sorkin, Dealbook, and linking out

second-quarter investor letter, which was immediately published by Dealbreaker. It's a very political document, kicking off with a full page of quotations from various presidents (and, for some reason, Chinese general Liu Yazhou). It's easy to see why Andrew Ross Sorkin uses it as the jumping-off point for his column today, headlined "Why Wall St Is Deserting Obama". And as ever, the column is reposted at Sorkin's Dealbook blog.
"
data-share-img=""
data-share="twitter,facebook,linkedin,reddit,google,mail"
data-share-count="false">

On Friday, Dan Loeb released his second-quarter investor letter, which was immediately published by Dealbreaker. It’s a very political document, kicking off with a full page of quotations from various presidents (and, for some reason, Chinese general Liu Yazhou). It’s easy to see why Andrew Ross Sorkin uses it as the jumping-off point for his column today, headlined “Why Wall St Is Deserting Obama.” And as ever, the column is reposted at Sorkin’s Dealbook blog.

Now Sorkin and Dealbook are the exemplars, at the NYT, when it comes to the journalistic virtue of putting primary documents online. Their Scribd account has over 100,000 subscribers and has had over 2 million visits; it’s much more active than the parallel documents.nytimes.com format used by much of the rest of the paper.

But anybody reading Sorkin’s column today simply has to take him at his word when he says that Loeb’s letter “sounded as if he were preparing to join Glenn Beck in Washington over the weekend.”

If I wanted, I could paint I different picture of the letter. I could point out that there are no fewer than three quotes from Barack Obama on its first page, talking about the importance of helping others and spreading wealth across the whole American population. I could note that Loeb is just as harsh on capitalists as he is on the government.

Many people see the collapse of the sub-prime markets, along with the failure and subsequent rescue of many banks, as failures of capitalism rather than a result of a vile stew of inept management, unaccountable boards of directors, and overmatched regulators not just asleep, but comatose, at the proverbial switch.

And he also sees new government rules being helpful on this front:

Many of the boards we have come across are populated by individuals who rely on the stipends they receive from numerous corporate boards and thus appear motivated primarily to ensure continuing board fees, first-class air travel and accommodations, and a steady diet of free corned beef sandwiches until they reach their mandatory retirement age. We are therefore encouraged by the recently finalized proxy rules, which will ease the nomination and election of directors by shareholders.

He’s even pulling with the government when it comes to cracking down on sleazy for-profit colleges:

Our perspective on the government’s increased willingness to use its regulatory muscle enhanced our short positions in the for-profit education space. Indeed, this summer certain government actions taken regarding these companies served to accelerate the unfolding of our thesis on these names.

So, who has the more accurate view of Loeb’s letter, me or Sorkin? The answer is Sorkin: I’ve been quoting very selectively. But in one crucial respect I’m being much more open and transparent about the letter than he is: I’m linking to it. He’s not.

There’s no legal or journalistic reason why Sorkin shouldn’t link prominently to the letter. When I spoke to Richard Samson, the NYT’s top lawyer on such matters, he was clear that although there are copyright reasons why the NYT might not post the letter itself, there’s absolutely nothing to stop the paper from linking to where the letter is posted elsewhere. And in general, Sorkin’s Dealbook blog is pretty good when it comes to external links.

I see a few possible reasons why Sorkin might not link to the letter, none of them good.

First, he might be moving Dealbook away from the blog concept (and it was always more of an email newsletter than a blog to begin with) to something much more self-contained. Dealbook has been hiring aggressively, and is clearly setting itself up in opposition to, and in competition with, other online sources of financial news. Maybe that makes Sorkin more hesitant to link out than he was in the past.

Alternatively, maybe Sorkin is happy to link out in theory, but he has problems linking specifically to the relatively juvenile and tabloid Dealbreaker. I don’t think that’s true: Dealbook does link to Deabreaker on a semi-regular basis.

There’s a couple of other possibilities, too, which are more worrying. Perhaps Sorkin got the letter directly from Loeb himself, on the condition that he not publish it, and he felt that linking to it would violate the spirit of that agreement. Or maybe there was no formal agreement at all, but Sorkin just felt that linking to the letter would annoy Loeb, and therefore decided not to do so in order to help maintain his relations with a source.

Or maybe it was just an oversight, further evidence that linking to primary sources simply isn’t very important at the NYT.

My hope, as Dealbook beefs up, is that it’s going to become more, rather than less, bloggish — that it’s going to spend as much effort on aggregating and curating news and information from around the web as it is on breaking that news itself. Indeed, one would expect Dealbook to have linked to Loeb’s letter before Sorkin’s column appeared.

Of course, the coming NYT paywall is going to make such bloggishness difficult, but difficult need not mean impossible. Let’s hope Sorkin hasn’t given up on many of the possibilities of the online medium before he’s even really got going.